Reading Stiegler’s Nanjing Lectures while passing through Nanjing: Health code automatism and functional stupidity

The presentation will begin with an anecdote of my mum and I passing through Nanjing on a high-speed train during the height of the 2021 Nanjing lockdown. As a result of this 5min travel history in Nanjing registered by the telecom infrastructure, two days after our arrival in Wuhan, my mum was taken to a hotel quarantine. The district-level governor’s reply after mum’s repeal of her case: “I know you did not get off the train and I trust you with electronic evidence of the train ticket, but the system has already granted you the red code and the only way for you to turn the code green again is to stay in the quarantine hotel for two weeks. I cannot do anything about it.” This talk is an attempt to make sense of the enigma of automated decision-making under the current regime through Stiegler’s Nanjing lectures on automatism and functional stupidity (Stiegler 2016; 2020).

While Stiegler’s comments are mostly on financial capitalism and data-harvesting platforms making us into “dividuals”, it also points to the rise of systemic stupidity in the processes of automated decision-making. By functional stupidity, Stiegler is referring to the situation in which socialized automatism (such as public transport) is suspended by algorithmic automatism. This automatism has been producing its own dis-automatization through appropriated knowledge (the automatic collection of data such as location history, synchronisation of such data on a national scale, and a regional/local interpretation of such data)—as a result, new asocial automatism emerges, and it is not negotiable. This is to say, Stiegler’s argument on the systemic stupidity between consumers and speculators also applies to the current bureaucratic schizophrenia. This also points to a highly visible vulgarisation of the national imagination of CHINA.AI stipulated by de Seta (2020).